Journal Entries
Pubs, bars, cafes.
Posted Aug 2, 2003
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/3116579.stm
I've long thought that there must be a niche in the UK for French-style cafes - a place where you can get a good cup of coffee and halfway decent food just as easily as you can get a pint or a G+T.
I'm not talking about just another restaurant, I mean a place with the same kind of licencing laws as pubs and the same age restrictions. I doubt that places like that would be prone to the same kind of 'Saturday night' culture which leads to so much drunkenness and so many punch-ups after chucking out time.
Nor am I talking about your average Wetherspoons, although those are an improvement on many of the UK's pubs.
The stress which pubs and bars put on alcohol and nothing else is to their detriment in that the majority of people go there purely to get drunk, whilst only a handful go for any other reason, like because it's a nice place to go, for instance.
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Latest reply: Aug 2, 2003
Get some perspective mate
Posted Aug 2, 2003
"Fan Paul Glover was "gutted" after paying £40 to hear a muffled version of his favourite song, Angels, from his car."
There are more important issues in life than not being able to see Robbie Willams play your favourite song 
Discuss this Journal entry [20]
Latest reply: Aug 2, 2003
They know the price of everything but the value of nothing
Posted Jul 28, 2003
I heard that said many times about the Thatcher/Major governments. I haven't heard it said yet about the Bush administration but I reckon it's just as valid a comment.
I caught a piece on NPR over the weekend - if you want to listen to it yourself you can do so by going here http://discover.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.jhtml?prgId=2&prgDate=July/27/2003 and scrolling down to the link for 'Commentary: Tax Credit Blues'.
The gist of what the commentator said was that he would much rather the government kept his tax credit. His $800 on its own couldn't do anything to fix the the big problems, but if the government kept his, and everyone else's tax refund (the one that Bush tried so desperately to push through) it could be pooled and spent properly and with some altruism and thought for the future, instead of giving it to spendthrift, selfish citizens so that they could pay off some of their credit card bill or buy something else they don't need.
He gave an example of some women who volunteered for a medical study involving oestrogen. At the time, oestrogen was thought to be a miracle drug for women, but this study proved that to be wrong. What the women who took part in the study did though (he said) was to show an enormous generosity of spirit and immense altruism by offering to be someone who may not get this 'miracle drug' (it was a long-term study - many years as I recall) whilst others did.
He concluded by saying that America would be a far better place if we all held a similar attitude. Not too hard to agree with that really.
Now, all we have to do is find everyone else in America who thinks the same way and organise. Then maybe we can out this nasty, vile, spiteful, and mean-spirited administration.
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Latest reply: Jul 28, 2003
Cloaks and daggers
Posted Jul 19, 2003
So what are your views about the death of weapons expert David Kelly? At the time of posting this it appears as if he commited suicide. Did he? Or was he murdered by someone who made it look like a suicide? And who would be likely to do something like that?
I wish I was able to watch Newsnight - Jezza must be all over this one like a cheap suit 
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Latest reply: Jul 19, 2003
Progress
Posted Jul 18, 2003
In 1993 I spent a little over two months in America - a couple of weeks in New York, six weeks in LA, then another week in NY (with a weekend in Atlanta thrown in for good measure).
I stayed with a couple of friends in NY - they lived in a basement apartment near Oyster Bay, and the landlords (a youngish professional couple) lived upstairs. They were good friends with the couple, who often came down, and whilst I was there the husband, John, noticed the short wave radio I'd brought with me to listen to the BBC World Service. Although he didn't know it was mine, he saw it and twigged that it was and why I had it. He said that his family was originally from central Europe, and he remembered as a kid that there was always a short wave radio in the house so that the old folks - the ones who originally moved to America - could listen to news from home via their country's overseas broadcasts.
Ten years down the line I'm living in America and I don't need a short wave radio to listen to the World Service - I can listen to almost any BBC broadcast over the web via live streaming. It's great being able to listen to all the stuff I used to listen to, and with the same kind of quality as a decent FM receiver.
I think I might still get myself a little SW radio though because the internet takes away the fun of wandering up and down the dial, never knowing what you're going to find. Whilst in London I managed to pull in broadcasts from China, and even Vietnam. But getting the stations from behind the Iron Curtain was always exciting, purely because those countries were so inaccessible by any other means and so different, being under the yoke of the Soviet Union. Even though they were mostly less than a thousand miles away, they may as well have been on the other side of the Moon for all that I knew of them.
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Latest reply: Jul 18, 2003
There is only one thing worse than being Gosho, and that is not being Gosho
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